Glands
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"—Oh, Bill!" Peg gasped while her husband explained what exactly had been put into Edward's glass of lemonade.
Bill Boggs bit his lip and lowered a concerned frown down towards the supine and wildly gurgling Edward, who had moments before reeled against the basement mini bar. Slowly, Edward's sallow face turned a watery hue of pea-green and a little, shiny puddle of drool oozed from his mouth onto the linoleum floor. Even worse, the drinking straw had yet to be removed from his lips – so a pathetic whistling sound fluted-out every time Edward tried to squeeze out a breath.
"Why did you give Edward whiskey, of all things?"
"Honest, Peg, I thought it would calm him down." Bill shook his head, flummoxed by the sight before him.
Peg Boggs gave a slightly agitated look towards her husband, "Goodness, Bill . . . !"
Kim, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, was still backed up against the wall. Quite frankly, it looked like she'd be collapsing any moment too . . .
Continuing to shake his balding bowling ball-like head, Bill looked at the bottle of whiskey, sniffed it for anything wrong, frowned puzzledly when nothing wrong was smelled, but still threw the bottle away. Best to get rid of the offending object, anyway— since this was sort of an embarrassing situation for him . . . as Mr. Boggs had always been an avid preacher to his kids against drinking hard booze.
Feeling like a down-right hypocrite, Bill gave a sorry look over to Peg, and started to drag the gurgling Edward up from the floor.
" . . . Oh my God . . ." Kim murmured, hoarsely, "Oh my God."
"C'mon, Kim. Stop being such a drama queen and give me a hand with Ed, will ya?" Bill pulled a very floppy Edward onto one of the pepper-red barstools.
"No." Kim answered, rather flatly, as her eyes scanned the leather-clad boy's shiny, hazardous hands. Gradually, her eyes rounded to the size of county fair watermelons.
"Now, Kim . . . " After shooting her daughter the patented 'Disapproving Mother-Stare', Peg sighed softly, "Oh, just nevermind. I'll help, Bill."
Fanning the dazed-eyed Edward, flinging the straw out of his mouth, and fussing over his temperature Bill and Peg hovered with parental tactfulness over the messy-haired, ghost-white boy .
Watching this with a dark glint in her eye, Kim felt a little twinge of jealousy— after all, these were her parents fawning over a complete stranger who had (might Kim add) practically assaulted her with . . . those weird hands of his.
If anything, Kim convinced herself, her mom and dad should be fussing over her.
"Are you feeling any better, honey-bear?" Hand over Edward's sliced-up pasty white forehead, Peg asked with motherly concern.
When Kim heard this, she could hardly believe how amazingly jealous she felt— "honey-bear" was her nickname! How could Mom do this, right in front of her? This was an outrage. Twisting the belt of her daisy-yellow nightrobe, trying to vent her ferocious feelings, Kim started to show the sneaking tell-tale signs of the green-eyed monster . . .
Groaning softly, and trying hard not to lose balance on the sitting stool, Edward felt his innards turning against him. Esophagus frying underneath sizzling lava-hot gastric fluids, the boy's stomach was one big, scalding blob of fire— so much so, in fact, Edward became very faint and palsied.
This new drink that Bill gave him . . . it tore at his throat as it went down. Unlike the sweet, cool, fruity soda pops Edward had had during the barbecue, this drink burnt. It was hot and strong, saturated with hard spice.
Peg smoothed out Edward's wiry Einstein-esque hair. "Oh, I know just the thing for this— Kim," The middle-aged suburban mom turned towards the glaring teen in the background, "Kim, come with me to the kitchen, will you please?"
Sulkily abandoning her post by the wall, Kim shuffled slowly in toe behind her mother up the rickety basement staircase. Before reaching the top floor, the fair-haired girl sent a glance down to the still-quivering Edward who now was being nursed by her dad . . . Kim frowned uneasily, watching those metal shears snip as Bill swiped off a thin thread of drool from Edward's cadaverously white face .
Freak. Kim shuddered.
Bustling into the kitchen, Peg Boggs rummaged ambitiously through every jar and every cabinet, burrowing deep into the drawers for a packet of orange-spice tea.
"Could you get out the ice, dear?" Peg told Kim, behind her shoulder, "I'm going to make Edward some ice tea, to help him get over the jitters . . ."
"Mom . . . "
"Now, dear, I know this is all a big adjustment, but we'll just have to make-do until . . ."
"Mom, can you hear me out just one second?" Voice going a few octaves higher than normal, Kim's voice swelled with a high-pitched, flutey irritability. Truly the high school cheerleader hadn't been this mad, or jealous, or confused about something this strongly before in a long, long time.
"Of course, Kimmy. What's wrong?" Kim's mom asked, sweetly, while scavenging through the plastic cabinets for a packet of tea.
After a short but awkward pause, Kim gushed out, "I'm scared of this guy. He freaks me out."
"Oh, Kim!" With a frown that wrinkled up her spectacled face, Peg rotated around to give her daughter a look of disappointment and of strong disapproval.
Despite this, Kim continued to vent.
"And in my opinion— that used to matter around here, by the way— he's weird and dangerous and . . ." Kim hissed out a high, shaky breath, "And I don't want him to live here . . . and, a-and . . . I'll just go live with Jim if you don't make this guy leave!"
"Now don't be so ridiculous," Peg said, dismissing her child's threat as a whim of hormones, "Edward doesn't have the heart to harm a fly, Kimmy. He's a sweetheart, I know it . . . when you get to know him better, I bet you'll think so too. And, the only reason why there was this big fandango tonight was because you just surprised him a little, Kimmy."
Get to know him better? Kim was strongly against the idea of being inside the same room as this creep, let alone trying to sit down and "get to know him". Feeling disgusted and upset, Kim tapped her foot crazily on the kitchen-tile floor . . . she was so upset, in fact, it seemed like smoke would billow out of her ears at any minute.
"Mom, c'mon, make sense. He's got scissors for hands . . . and have you seen his face? . . . " Kim tried to explain to her reality-blind mother, " . . . It's just unnatural."
Bottle-glass spectacles dropping in shock at the mean-spiritedness of Kim's feelings, Peg stopped in her tracks. How could Kim be so heartless, especially towards a disfigured boy like Edward? And, well, frankly, this made Peg's blood boil a little. Very few things made this suburban housewife lose her cool . . . but being stony hearted to the less fortunate was definitely one of them.
"Kim, that's enough! Honestly, you should be ashamed of yourself!" Peg scolded, "Edward is not unnatural— all he is, is just a good boy and I don't want you going around saying such awful things about him. Understood?"
"You can't be serious." Kim gawked, amazed at her mom's profound feeble-mindedness. "Mom, obviously, something's wrong with him . . . "
"No, I think there's something wrong with you." At the end of her tether, Peg retorted and swooped past her daughter to get to the refrigerator.
In a huff, Kim stalked off to her bedroom and— with an enormous slam! that nearly shook the entire house—she locked her door firmly, started playing her favorite album, and didn't come out for the rest of the evening.
Deep down in the basement, Bill and Edward listened to the conversation through the air ducts . . . and, just now, felt a strong shiver shake the whole house as Kim slammed her door . . .
"Glands." Bill murmured, a bit embarrassed by what he'd just heard,"I'm tellin' ya, Ed, it's those glands again. C'mon now, son, don't take what Kim said seriously. She just gets . . . kind of. . ." Slowly, Bill struggled for the right wordage, "She just gets kinda. . . emotional sometimes."
Edward gave Bill a meaningful look, trying to pretend he understood.
In actuality, Edward hardly understood anything that had happened that evening — it had all gone by so quickly, it all whisked away in one confusingly tangled-up blur, leaving Edward unbelievably flustered and, most of all, humiliated. From Kim screaming her head off to the lemonade incident, Edward had pretty much been clueless as to what was actually going on.
Still, some of the things Kim had said— they hurt so horribly. To Edward, her picture been so angelic and perfect — as if she embodied all that was happy and lovely and sweet. But, now . . . Edward couldn't be so sure. Though he did blame himself for being so ungentlemanly when he first saw her; after all, his Inventor had only talked about meeting young ladies in a pleasant little parlor, where everyone would have tea and teacakes. Never before had Edward been trained what to do if a girl comes in at the dead of night, starts undressing, and then goes utterly crazy.
Edward frowned, guessing that he should've at least apologized for making Kim's waterbed explode. Maybe she wouldn't be so frightened of him now if he had only been more polite but, then again, maybe not . . .
Maybe it was just the glands, like Bill said.
The Disclaimer:
I don't own Edward. There we have it. Short and sweet.